When corporate users and so on at their corporate location obtain application programs (which may hereinafter be referred to simply as “applications”) by using their terminal apparatuses, they obtain the applications from application servers storing the applications through an in-house local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN), such as the Internet. In this case, proxy servers that serve as relay apparatuses in an application layer are provided between the terminal apparatuses and the WAN, and the terminal apparatuses use the proxy servers to obtain the applications from the application servers.
When one terminal apparatus issues a request (application request) for an application to an application server, a proxy assignment apparatus assigns a guide-target proxy server from among the proxy servers to the terminal apparatus. The guide-target proxy server serves to guide the application request destined for an application uniform resource locator (URL) of the application server to be accessed. The application URL indicates a location where the requested application is stored. The guide-target proxy server, in place of the terminal apparatus, accesses the application URL to obtain and cache content data of the requested application. Thus, by accessing the guide-target proxy server to obtain the cache data in the guide-target proxy server, the terminal apparatus may obtain the requested application.
Related technique is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2010-130604.
The proxy assignment apparatus identifies a terminal apparatus that issues an application request by using an internet protocol (IP) address assigned to the terminal apparatus, and assigns a guide-target proxy server for the requested application to the terminal apparatus.
However, for example, in a system in which different IP addresses are assigned to the same terminal apparatus for respective domains, when the terminal apparatus moves from one domain to another, the IP address before the movement and the IP address after the movement differ from each other. Thus, even when the same terminal apparatus issues requests for the same application, the proxy assignment apparatus may assign different guide-target proxy servers to the same terminal apparatus, since the IP address of the terminal apparatus before the movement and the IP address of the terminal apparatus after the movement differ from each other. Consequently, cache data of the same application for the same terminal apparatus is redundantly registered in both of the guide-target proxy server before the movement and the guide-target proxy server after the movement.